WikiLeaks is a rare example of a newsgathering organisation
that exposes the truth. Julian Assange is by no means alone.

By John Pilger

February 14, 2013 "Information
Clearing House"
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Last December, I stood with supporters of WikiLeaks and
Julian Assange in the bitter cold outside the Ecuadorean
embassy in London. Candles were lit; the faces were young
and old and from all over the world. They were there to
demonstrate their human solidarity with someone whose guts
they
admired. They were in no doubt about the importance of what
Assange had revealed and achieved, and the grave dangers he
now faced. Absent entirely were the lies, spite, jealousy,
opportunism and pathetic animus of a few who claim the right
to guard the limits of informed public debate.

These
public displays of warmth for Assange are common and seldom
reported. Several thousand people packed Sydney Town Hall,
with hundreds spilling into the street. In New York
recently, Assange was awarded the Yoko Ono Lennon Prize for
Courage. In the audience was Daniel Ellsberg, who risked
all to leak the truth about the barbarism of the Vietnam
War.

Like
the philanthropist Jemima Khan, the investigative journalist
Phillip Knightley, the acclaimed film-maker Ken Loach and
others lost bail money in standing up for Julian Assange.
“The US is out to crush someone who has revealed its dirty
secrets,” Loach wrote to me. “Extradition via Sweden is more
than likely… is it difficult to choose whom to support?”

No, it is not
difficult.

In the New
Statesman last week, Jemima Khan, a philanthropist,
ended her support for an epic struggle for justice, truth
and freedom with an article on WikiLeaks’s founder. To Khan,
the Ellsbergs and Yoko Onos, the Knightleys and Loaches, and
the countless people they represent, have all been duped. We
are all “blinkered”. We are all mindlessly “devoted”. We are
all cultists.

In the
final words of her j’accuse, Khan describes Assange
as “an Australian L. Ron Hubbard”. She must have known such
gratuitous abuse would make a snappy headline — as indeed it
did across the press in Australia.

I
respect Jemima Khan for backing humanitarian causes, such as
the Palestinians. She supports for Martha Gellhorn Prize for
Journalism, of which I am a judge, and my own film-making.
But her attack on Assange is specious and plays to a
familiar gallery whose courage is tweeted from a
smart-phone. One of Khan’s main complaints is that Assange
refused to appear in a film about WikiLeaks by the American
director Alex Gibney, which she “executive produced”.
Assange knew the film would be neither “nuanced” nor “fair”
and “represent the truth”, as Khan claimed, and that its
very title WikiLeaks, We Steal Secrets, was a gift
to the fabricators of a bogus criminal indictment that could
doom him to one of America’s hell-holes. Having interviewed
axe grinders and turncoats, Gibney abuses Assange as
paranoid. DreamWorks is also making a film about the
“paranoid” Assange. Oscars all round.

The
sum of Khan’s and Gibney’s attacks is that Ecuador granted
Assange asylum without evidence. The evidence is voluminous.
Assange has been declared an official “enemy” of a
torturing, assassinating, rapacious state. This is clear in
official files, obtained under Freedom of Information, that
betray Washington’s “unprecedented” pursuit of him, together
with the Australian government’s abandonment of its citizen:
a legal basis for granting asylum.

Khan
refers to a “long list” of Assange’s “alienated and
disaffected allies”. Almost none was ever an ally. What is
striking about most of these “allies” and
Assange’s haters is that they exhibit the very symptoms of
arrested development they attribute to a man whose
resilience and humour under extreme pressure are evident to
those he trusts.

On her
“long list” is London lawyer Mark Stephens, who charged him
almost half a million pounds in fees and costs. This bill
was paid from an advance on a book whose unauthorised
manuscript was published by another “ally” without Assange’s
knowledge or permission. When Assange moved his legal
defence to Gareth Peirce, Britain’s leading human rights
lawyer, he found a true ally. Khan makes no mention of the
damning, irrefutable evidence that Peirce presented to the
Australian government, warning how the US deliberately
“synchronised” its extradition demands with pending cases
and that her client faced a grave miscarriage of justice and
personal danger. Peirce told the Australian consul in London
in person that she had known few cases as shocking as this.

It is
a red herring whether Britain or Sweden holds the greatest
danger of delivering Assange to the US. The Swedes have
refused all requests for guarantees that he will not be
dispatched under a secret arrangement with Washington; and
it is the political executive in Stockholm, with its close
ties to the extreme right in America, not the courts,
that will make this decision.

Khan
is rightly concerned about a “resolution” of the allegations
of sexual misconduct in Sweden. Putting aside the tissue of
falsehoods demonstrated in the evidence in this case, both
women had consensual sex with Assange, and neither claimed
otherwise; and the Stockholm prosecutor, Eva Finne, all but
dismissed the case. As Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff
of Women Against Rape wrote in the Guardian last
August, “The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen
behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp
down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the
public their secret planning of wars and occupations with
their attendant rape, murder and destruction… The
authorities care so little about violence against women that
they manipulate rape allegations at will. [Assange] has made
it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish
authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing
this essential step in their investigation? What are they
afraid of?”

Editor's
note: The full title of the film about Wikileaks "We
Steal Secrets: The Story of
Wikileaks" has now been included in this article.

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